Former Taraba Governor, Jolly Nyame (1991-1993; 1999-2007), is going to jail for sleaze, but there is nothing jolly about it — not for him; not for the society, which feels diminished.
By a former governor going to jail, the political elite takes a hit, even if you could say politics and politicians were never top notch, in the society’s pyramid of trust.
As a clergy man, the Revd. Jolly Nyame, as jailed former governor, crushes the moral bragging right, of the religious elite.
Were Geoffery Chaucer, the old English poet, alive in contemporary Nigeria, his old quip, about the lone sane Parson among the Canterbury pilgrims, in his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, would still have held true: if gold rusts, what would iron do?
But that would appear another huge blow in symbolic term: Chaucer-era Parson was the lone sane voice, among a brood of venal characters, on a showy pilgrimage to Canterbury, in Catholic England.
On the contrary, jailing a reverend gentleman, in today’s Nigeria, appears a further confirmation of the clergy as yet another racket, with the unfazed outrage of many a Pentecostal pastor; and the penchant of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to play blatant politics with everything, even if the matter — the war against sleaze, for instance — demands, by the sheer essence of its calling, that CAN should champion such. But alas!
Still, projecting Nyame’s conviction as proof of blanket condemnation of the clerical class is nothing but reckless fallacy. That cannot be true, for Nigeria still boasts thousands of decent, if quiet, clergymen, in and out of politics. Such should speak louder, against folks giving their noble calling a bad name.
But in the Nyame conviction, the society is generally diminished. It’s all trite to maintain the law is no respecter of persons, and whoever commits the crime must do the time. Fair enough — and for those culling skulls, the Nyame conviction is proof that the anti-corruption war is beginning to cruise at the right altitude, with high profile convictions.
Still, there is that pathos and bathos that ripple through society like an electric shock, and draws great pity — not because of the convict per se, but because in such tragedies, the society tastes the gall of a high personage tripping and falling into disgrace.
It is such bathos and pathos that drive Shakespeare and its dramatic tragedies, defined as “fatal flaws”; or what the Greeks would call “Achilles heel”, from which even the most respectable and most honoured of mortals must fall.
If you dig deeper in Greek mythology, you even got a glimpse of deep superstition, nay fatalism, that mortals were only playthings in the hands of gods — malevolent gods — and that these flaws were their built-in trigger to make mortals falls, so gods could have their spiteful kick! But you could also guess these were even inventions of humans, who had failed in controlling their internal flaws, and decided to blame such on the gods who, even if they could defend themselves, considered that infra dig, before wayward humans!
Still, however you interpret it, a mighty man that trips and falls evokes deep sympathy. That fuels the classical drama.
In contemporary Nigeria, with its free-for-all stealing, the “fatal flaw” is clearly sleaze. That was the abnormal that had become the norm.
But can any normal mind claim he is unmoved that a three-time governor, straddling the aborted Third Republic (1991-1993) and two terms in the present dispensation (1999-2007), is now a convict for sleaze?
Public office holders must fix their ways, to avert diminishing the rest of us with such convictions. In the final analysis, everyone is better off on the narrow and winding way.
